


The Universe in Which Catra found the Sword

by AimlessCat



Series: She-Ra Au's and Oneshots [1]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Gen, catra is she-ra, mostly a drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 10:41:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18207296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AimlessCat/pseuds/AimlessCat
Summary: Catra is the one who finds the sword, but she was never going to be the same type of She-Ra as Adora





	The Universe in Which Catra found the Sword

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know this was a drabble that got a bit out of hand, but who cares I'm sure someone here will enjoy it

Catra is the one who finds the sword. The images shown to her drive her back into the forest, stumbling into Bow and Glimmer.

But Glimmer is filled with _rage_ at the war and it overflows into every single moment of interaction with Catra. It grates at her. Nobody believes in Catra, nobody ever asked what she wanted and meant it, and the one bright spot in her life is tainted by the shadow she casts. She has been dealing with people yelling at her, angry with her, assuming things about her since the moment she could remember. So she flexes her claws and bides her time til she can escape, with her sword, and get back to Adora. 

She just hopes she can keep the secret of what the sword transformed her into from the girl. Princess’s have always been the enemy after all, and Catra can’t fathom the idea of Adora as her enemy instead of her friend.

Thaymor comes. It’s… refreshing, prisoner or not, for these villagers who don’t know her to treat her with kindness. Respect.

_(Something like longing curls in her gut, but even so far away from her, the thought of Adora waiting is a sirens call to Catra that she is helpless to ignore. She needs to go back.)_

Then the Horde comes. It always comes.

But it’s Adora. Adora with her golden hair and cool gray eyes, tinted green by her visor. The same green as the visors in training, the kind that displays the holograms for training. Catra’s always wondered about it. By the way Adora doesn’t seem to realize it’s a civilian town, Catra knows she has always been right.

After all, there’s nothing honest in the Horde. _(Not even her.)_

Adora is miffed, worried about her being gone so long, and just wants to finish this mission and the two to go home. Catra accepts that.  
But the villagers were kind, the villager who were the first people in her life to not raise a hand against her in any way. They didn’t jump to conclusions or yell or hate her. They treated her like….like…like _she mattered_ as a person simply because she **existed**.

Catra tries to convince Adora to call off the attack. So they can go home. 

Adora doesn’t believe her. (She never did have much faith in Catra. No one ever did, after all.) Adora is upset and refuses to believe the Horde would ever do something like that, especially not when she can SEE with her own two _green tinted_ eyes.

Catra has to ask again, has to try again, because these villagers were kind.

They fight, and Catra hates it. (Glimmer still has the sword. Glimmer would never trust Catra with it. There is no delicate bonds of potential friendship forged between the two, not like had it been Adora.)  
But Catra knocks off Adora’s visor anyway, claws retracted all the way so she doesn’t hurt her.

Adora sees. Catra, for just a moment, is happy and relieved. Maybe now Adora will call off the attack, and they can go home, and Catra’s debt to the village will be paid.  
But Adora, who should KNOW what the Horde is like because hasn’t she seen what they do to the cadets? To Catra? She sees the villagers and turns on the Horde in that very moment. She tries to call off the attack, and when that doesn’t work she fights them instead.

Afterwards, Catra just wants to go home. She wants to curl up at the bottom of their shared bunk, the warmth of Adora’s body close, and sleep.

Adora is upset, angry that even after seeing this Catra wants to go back. (Catra bites her tongue to keep from saying “But I told you!”) Catra follows, because of course she does.  
Adora turns herself into Glimmer and Bow, who saw them turncoat and fight off the Horde.

Glimmer and Bow love Adora, almost right away. Adora, who turned as soon as she saw what the Horde did. (When has anybody ever picked Catra over Adora? She tells herself she’s not surprised, not _hurt_.) Adora and Catra aren’t sneaked in. After all, Glimmer has the sword, and two are sort of prisoners.

The Queen takes the sword (the sword that is Catra’s, that calls to her still) and accepts, grudgingly, Adora’s plea to join the Rebellion. Catra follows, but tries just once, to ask for her sword back. But Glimmer doesn’t trust her, and Catra hasn’t transformed since that first time, and there is no good will to Catra for the sword. Queen Angella, wings flared in anger and _looming_ over her like-….. 

Catra’s claims to the sword are dismissed. Inside she _burns_.

Catra burns and _burns_ and _**burns**_. Adora clicks with Glimmer and Bow, and they love her. Of course they do. It’s their squad all over again, with Catra hanging on only by virtue of her friendship with Adora.

Eventually, Glimmer gets the bright idea for ADORA to try to wield the sword. Catra bites her tongue and _**burns.**_

The sword still calls to her, the images still flash in her mind and taunt her.

The moment Glimmer and Bow excitedly sneak the sword into Adora and Catra’s shared room, and just…offer it to her, something **breaks**. Catra sees them offer it to her, sees Adora’s hand on the hilt, and leaves immediately. The trio she leaves behind doesn’t notice.

She jumps from the window and flees into the forest.

She never gets to see that the sword doesn’t work for Adora.

_(After all, the sword chose Catra in this universe. Catra who is fiercely loyal, ambitious and determined. Catra who could do so much if someone just gave her the chance. If someone, just once, believed in her. In a parallel universe it was Hordak who offered. In this it was the Sword. But in both, nearly everyone else still chose Adora.)_

She does not get to see Adora’s panic at the realization she is gone, doesn’t get to see Glimmer’s seething rage, convinced that Catra returned to the Horde. If she had, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see that Glimmer convinces Adora of this. After all, Adora never had much _faith_ in her after all.

 

Adora joins the Rebellion. She goes with Glimmer and Bow as they try to revive the Princess Alliance, and see if any of the Princesses can wield the Sword of Power.

 

Catra flees into the forest, she runs and _runs and **runs.**_ She does not meet Razz, does not find her way into a Temple that opens for her, for she has no sword, no proof, no reason. She never once learns the name “She-Ra”. 

Instead, she finds her way, stumbling and _hurt_ into the rubble of Thaymor. Into the arms of all the newly made refugees who were left behind by a Princess and her friend when they left to go back to their castle. 

Catra learns that Princesses always seem to go back to their castle. The only soldiers of the Rebellion seem to be the ones who patrol castles and protect the royalty. Rarely do they ever seem to go to battle to protect anyone but themselves, meer tokens of resistance, just enough to pat themselves on the back. 

 

The people are left behind to wander somewhere new, or very rarely, try to rebuild their destroyed city. Catra stumbles into Thaymor as the survivors search through the rubble for anything they can salvage, as they prepare to leave and try to find somewhere else to simply survive. 

 

Catra becomes just another refuge. She tosses her cadet badge into the dirt of Thaymor, finds a new shirt taken from homes of the dead, and becomes a nameless face in a crowd of nameless faces. 

She tries to leave behind her mask. Tries. Instead it’s shoved to the bottom of her new pack, and she tries to forget it in the same way that she tries to forget about the sword. (It doesn’t work very well, but Catra has practice in the art of ignoring things.)

 

 

 

The Thaymor Refugees accept Catra as one of their own. These people with their short fur, horns and hooves, and long ears. Everyone is tired, and scared. The children huddle near their parents and cling as tight as they can. There are children now with no parents. There are parents with no children. Grief is thick in the air wherever they go. 

At first Catra lingers on the edges. She tries not to snap or snarl, not to these kind people, but her fur bristles often. A few children lost everything in their world, and are alone even with all the people around willing to help and take them in, are the one's who come to Catra first in a meaningful way. These children with tear streaked faces and clenched fists, who know that she can fight, that she helped turn the tide of the attack, ask her to teach them. 

The children take her as their own, this half-adult who fought for them and joined them, even though it meant she left everything behind. This sometimes scary and feral hunter who joins in and helps bring in the meat for everyone as they travel. They are angry little things and Catra knows whats its like to be a scared, feral little child. So she teaches them, and slowly older teens and even young adults ask to join. Some are scared and want to protect themselves. Some are angry and want to be able to fight back for revenge. 

Slowly, the people of Thaymor become something new. A peaceful people who became Horde tinted and stained down to their very bones. Horde Destroyed but now Horde Trained. Some of the more dedicated and vicious of Catra’s new students sharpen their horns, and by the flickering fire of temporary camps adorn themselves with makeshift jewelry made of fangs, paint their fur in makeshift tiger-stripes. Slowly, these numbers grow, these dedicated fighters who train harder then even Adora did, back at the Horde. It becomes almost a uniform, these tiger-painted warriors who look to Catra and follow her lead. 

They are the one's who fight beside Catra against the beasts of the Whispering Woods as they travel, this little force of protectors against those seeking to harm the Thaymor Refugees. They listen to her, eventually help teach others, and one day as Catra is talking with Refugees elected leader, she realizes just what her little group really is. 

A small military force. A tiny army, barely even thirty people in total, all following her and looking to her as a leader. A general. 

It comforts her, in some weird way. This validation of something she’s always wanted. Children now talk about one day earning their ‘stripes’, as if having the honor of decorating their fur in stripes like Catra’s mean they are one of them, a soldier, a warrior. 

 

Thaymor isn’t the only place left ravaged by the Horde, and they are forced to travel and travel and _travel_ in search of somewhere they feel safe enough to settle. Travel is slow, moving a hundred or so civilians is hard work after all. Nobody wants to seek refuge at Brightmoon, with the princesses who left them alone in the burning place they all called home. So they travel, not willing to find another Princess to depend on, when the last left them alone.  
Ruins of other villages force them to keep going. But for every ruin and smoldering village they pass, more people join, more people become part of their group. One day Catra looks around, months after leaving Adora in Brightmoon, and realizes they’re not The Thaymor Refugees anymore.

They’re just the Refuges.

But as they grow as a group, so to does Catra’s little group. More and more people chose to ‘earn their stripes’. Someone brings in dye for those with fur, others bring ink and needles for skin. The stripes become permanent, on fur and skin both. 

When they pass villages that aren’t destroyed, some people choose to stay. Many choose to keep going. Sometimes people join the Refuges, leaving behind the safety of the villages behind them. Almost all of them end up with stripes like tigers. Word travels, whispers on wind.

The Refuges travel, but wherever they go, they are protected and surrounded by a small army, a resistance of tiger-painted fang-wearing warriors. Where The Refugees go, so do the Feral One's, lead by a dual-eyed woman known as ‘The Commander’.

Their numbers grow, but still they travel.

 

In the Rebellion, nobody can wield the sword. But Adora is passionate, and together she, Glimmer, and Bow all work to rebuild the alliance anyway. The Sword is still a symbol, a beacon of hope, and ever so slowly they fight back. They keep trying, keep fighting, because that’s what they _do_.  
(In this universe, without Catra, none of the attacks are the same. Shadow Weaver still wants Adora back, and it taints her actions. The Sea Gate continues to weaken, it falls, but Shadow Weaver doesn’t care, focused as she is on Adora. Scorpia doesn’t go to the Princess Prom. Entrapta doesn’t join the Horde. Brightmoon is never attacked directly. Everything is different. Hordak may be a force upon himself, but the people in his command are nowhere near his caliber. There is a reason that his war on Etheria is taking so long, and without Catra’s vicious but clever mind, without her ambition, it continues on as it has been, a slow creeping war with no end insight for either side.)

The Rebellion hears rumors, of a traveling group, and the little army they have. Glimmer tries to convince her mother to let them go find them, and bring them into the Rebellion. But the group travels, and without clear information on their location, the Queen deems it to much of a risk, to much of a wild-goose chase, and so they don’t.

 

For months the large group travels. Sometimes they run into Horde patrols, at first the fights were hard, won by the skin of their teeth. But with every group they defeat and send running, they take armor and weapons. Horde insignias are removed, scrubbed out and off, and made in their own, new image.

The Horde leaves wounded behind sometimes, but Catra was one of them once, and so she takes away the helmets with their green visors, and gives them something nobody gave her when she needed it.

A chance to choose.

Many hands reach out to clasp the hand she offers. They continue to grow.

Once, they pass by a Horde base in Plumeria. The Feral One’s take the base in a devastating surprise attack. They send soldiers running, and take the weapons they leave behind. Tanks are destroyed and scavenged for parts, skiffs stolen and loaded up with rations and everything they can take from the base. 

Catra finds the weird machine in the center of the base. It is _wrong_ in a way she can’t describe. It twists at the part of her that is plagued by dreams and the memory of a sword. 

She destroys it with a tank. 

(The Heart-Blossom is no longer actively being poisoned, but neither is it cured immediately. Instead over time it slowly gets better. Perfuma gets stronger, but the Rebellion has a harder time getting her to join them.)

 

When the Refugees finally, _finally_ settle down to rebuild, it’s in the long abandoned ruins of a city formerly known as ‘Half-Moon’. 

It hurts Catra, who looks around and finds evidence of people like her, of Magi-Cats. But much of it seems to be lost and in ruin. But there is a broken, barely standing statue in the middle of the city. The statue is of a magi-cat woman, stone face framed by the familiar shape of a mask.

Catra, who is still plagued by dreams of a sword and woman trying to speak to her, who tried and tried again to abandon the red-headpiece but can’t for some reason, feels something shift in her chest.

They remove the rubble of the statue as they rebuild in the forgotten city, but Catra walks around in her mask again. 

They rename the city ‘New-Moon’. 

 

New-Moon grows in both size and power. Those run out of their homes by the Horde start traveling there, and soon the Feral One’s are pushing out to help protect the villages closest to them. New-Moon becomes more than a city of refugees, it becomes a small but growing country, eating away at the Horde as they establish themselves. 

Catra, a born leader, thrives with her new people. She has always been fiercely loyal, and once upon a time it was Adora who alone had her loyalty. (Adora, who Catra still misses with a deep ache, who she still dreams about and reaches for in the night without thinking.) But now it’s her people, this mis-mash of outcasts and refugees, and she _loves_ them. They’re her’s now, and Catra is a selfish woman, and she hordes what is hers. 

Slowly, because of her fierce protectiveness towards everyone in the city, and her competence as a leader, earns her more and more respect. Nobody says it, nobody speaks the words, even as the man who lead the civilians from the initial group from Thaymor starts to defer to her.

Somehow, Catra becomes the leader of New-Moon, instead of just the leader of the Feral One's.

 

 

The Rebellion grows, slowly but surely. Adora travels always with the sword at her back now, despite not being able to use it. She misses Catra, but she also dreams of her. Vague dreams with glimpses of familiar yellow and blue eyes standing taller than she should be, with a sword in her hands.

Adora wonders, and after so long it’s become clear nobody is able to wield the sword in the Rebellion. Eventually, she tells her friends of the dream, and for the first time Glimmer and Bow speak of the day they meet Catra in the woods, and the brief time of which _she_ had transformed. Adora is a little more than furious, as is Queen Angella, but eventually that fury turns into determination. 

 

Adora will return the sword next time she sees Catra, if only she could find her.

 

 

 

Two years after Catra left Adora and the sword behind, and she is the leader of a small newly formed country. A Commander of a fierce and passionate army all to willing to fight against the Horde. 

 

The Feral One's and New-Moon, having caught the attention of the Horde, protect themselves viciously. 

Scorpia is the one leading the force that comes to attack them. She and Catra fight, but Catra lets her go at the end. 

After all, she was Horde down to her bones, and she knew what it was like.

Catra intends it as a message. They won’t be passive and let the Horde kill them without a fight, but neither will they stoop to the Horde’s level. When the fight is over, Catra makes sure the wounded are treated before they’re sent back with their tail between their legs. After a moment, she asks Scorpia to check in on her old squad. Time and distance does things to her it seems.

Word travels in the Horde, in a place where kindness is foreign, mercy unheard of.

People start to desert, the very first group with more than a few familiar faces. 

 

Scorpia’s family never joined the Horde willingly, despite what people will say. A forced hand in order to ensure the safety of her family's people. Scorpia is one of the last of her family, and when she comes back to New-Moon with a large group of former Horde soldiers (who never wanted to be what they were forced to be, touch-starved and hungry for the scraps of kindness Catra gave to those who first came back) it’s with the blessing of those left behind.

 

Those she leaves behind work secretly to help other deserters. 

 

At first New-Moon and its people were unwilling and angry. But the Horde takes from everyone, even it’s own, and soon everyone welcomes those who abandon the Horde, these men and women so desperate for something _good_ that they are willing to risking dying for the chance.

New-Moon grows, word spreads. Catra ends up meeting Entrapta, when the tiny purple-haired genius clashes into them near a First One’s ruin they’re looting. Entrapta may have been friends with the Rebellion, been a member, but none of her friends really understood her passions and what drove her.

Catra was more than willing to trade access to New-Moon’s vaults of old tech and books, in exchange for help in regards to their own patch-work systems.

Even in this universe, the ‘Super Pal Trio’ finds its way together, their odd friendship healing old wounds they didn’t want to admit they had.

 

 

Entrapta however, is still a Princess of the Alliance, and it’s through her that the Rebellion gets its first solid and reliable source of information on New-Moon and the former Thaymor Refugees, along with the Feral One's.

When she first says Catra’s name in her ramblings of information, Adora nearly topples her chair over.

 

The Princess Alliance decides to finally, _finally_ establish contact.

 

When Adora and Catra meet again, it’s with more than two years between them, a thousand new memories that they do not share.

But time heals old wounds, and they have not been bitter enemies in this life. 

Now they meet as new people. Adora, valued member of the Alliance despite not being a Princess, guardian of the Sword of Protection. 

Catra, leader of a country and its people, a new thorn in the Horde’s side. Respected, powerful, and confident in her place in the world.

Adora offers Catra the sword, eyes never leaving the woman before her. 

 

 

Catra has built a place for herself with her own two hands, craved it with her own claws and not the magic powers the Princesses boast. She fought the Horde without a sword, made a difference not because of a destiny bestowed upon her. 

Catra takes the sword, but she does so with the confidence of someone who will never be defined by the sword.

They will fight together against the Horde, and one day they will win. They have their entire lives ahead of them to define their relationship and who they are.

 

A hundred years in the future, when children sit down to learn their history, they will learn the names of past Princesses and the War they fought to free the world, but it will not be defined by the actions of some mystical warrior.

 

In this life, Catra found the Sword of Protection in the Whispering Woods. 

But Catra has never been, and will never be, someone who is defined by powers bestowed upon her. Catra is Horde tainted down to her bones, and she takes what she wants with her own two hands, climbs ranks by her own merit, no matter how that merit is earned. 

She fights not for some great duty, not driven by honor or compassion for the world at large. 

Catra is selfish, and that is the difference.

In this life, she was the one who chose to leave Adora first. Because of this, because she tore herself away and forced herself to find something else besides Adora, she found her place with the refugees. Catra is _selfish_ , and when the people claimed Catra as one of theirs, she in turn claimed them, and took on the world in order to give them all a home.

In another universe, Adora is a She-Ra motivated by duty to the whole world, to what is right no matter the cost.

In this universe, Catra is a She-Ra motivated not by duty, but by the ruthless decision to burn down anything that threatens the safety of those she considers hers. Hordak’s war threatened the safety of the people who accepted her, and so she was more than willing to go to war with him to protect them.

 

 

For the world, the rest is history, the likes of which they are allowed to write in the quiet of the world, at their own pace.

It’s not easy, it isn’t in either universe, but they’ll make it.


End file.
